Peter Flom wrote:
> Would it be possible to make the list available only to people who
> have registered?
This seems like the best idea.
It should not discourage serious posters. It may possibly discourage
the "please email me personally, I can't be bothered to read this list"
posters, but if one *wanted* to make life convenient for them (a point
open to debate) one could presumably have a "write-only registration"
that would effectively block spammers. Mail to the group would be sorted
three ways:
-Mail with no attachments, the heading "Subscribe", and either "read"
or "noread" in body: author's email address gets put onto posting list
and possibly mailing list.
-Mail with no attachments from a poster: remailed to reader list.
-All other mail -> dev/null.
Surely this (or something similar) is within the capacity of list
serving software?
A simple password *could* be used (this might need some scripting or be
impossible on some systems) to allow posting "from the road." For
instance, suppose every month all subscribers were sent a common
password which, included in a title line, would serve instead of a
recognized account. (It would be stripped out before remailing.) This
ought to be enough to foil spammers.
Is anybody expert in these matters?
Jackie Dietz wrote:
>In addition to this, more than half of the messages come from people who
>post to the newsgroup, not the list. The vast majority of the people
>who post to the newsgroup are not subscribers to the list.
>I want to make it clear that the reason I must step down as listowner is
>that I am starting a new job where I will not have the resources to run
>the list. I won't deny that the spam gets me down, but the spam is not
>the reason that we need a new listowner.
Jackie: I think the reason we're doing this is to see whether (perhaps
at the cost of requiring direct posting to the list and spending a few
minutes to subscribe first) the burden can be lowered to the point where
one of us, less dedicated or spam-tolerant than your truly noble self,
would pick it up.
It would be better to have an Edstat-L that carried a bit less dropin
traffic than not to have it at all.
-Robert
.
.
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